Bishop Richard Williamson, Holocaust denial, and the problem of “recantation” by cranks

It’s grant crunch time, as the submission deadline for revised R01s is July 5. However, in a classic example of how electronic filing has actually made things more difficult, the grant has to be done and at the university grant office a week before the deadline if it is to be uploaded in time. So, my beloved Orac-philes, I’m afraid it’s reruns one last time today, but, benevolent blogger that I am, I’ll again post two on the same topic. As regular readers know, I’ve had a long history of combatting Holocaust denial online, but I also have a real problem when the price of combatting Holocaust denial is suppressing free speech. For those of you who recall Bishop Richard Williamson, who was recently busted for Holocaust denial in an interview, I just realized that his trial in Germany is due to start on July 4. So I thought I’d repost a couple of posts I wrote around the time it all happened, back in 2009. Remember, if you haven’t been reading at least two years, it’s new to you! And maybe I’ll blog about the trial next week, too, which would make this a nice way to bring everyone back up to speed.

Because of the fallout from the revelation by Brian Deer that very likely Andrew Wakefield, hero of the antivaccine movement but, alas for his worshipers, one of the most dishonest and incompetent scientists who ever lived, had almost certainly falsified data for his infamous 1998 Lancet paper that launched a decade-long anti-MMR hysteria that shows no signs of abating, I ended up not coming back to a story I was very interested in. Although this story is about Holocaust denial, the questions raised by it are applicable not only to history and Holocaust denial, but to any area of science or history subject to crankery. In other words, this story brought up questions that to me apply not just to the skeptical evaluation of Holocaust denial, but to skepticism and science in general.

To recap, that story is about Bishop Richard Williamson, one of the four rogue bishops whose excommunication Pope Benedict XVI rescinded a couple of weeks ago, opening the way, or so Benedict seemed to hope, to a reconciliation between the Catholic Church and the Ã¼ber-conservative breakaway sect known as the Society of Saint Pius X. Unfortunately, Benedict not only neglected to demand that these four bishops publicly acknowledge the legitimacy of the Second Vatican Council and its teachings and accept the authority of the Pope before reversing their excommunication, but he and his vetters overlooked a rather glaring problem with Bishop Williamson.

BUENOS AIRES, ArgentinaÂ —Â A Roman Catholic bishop whose denials that the Holocaust ever happened led to Vatican demands he recant has been removed as the head of an Argentine seminary, local media reported Sunday, citing a Catholic official.

The ultraconservative Society of St. Pius X has dismissed Bishop Richard Williamson as director of its seminary in La Reja, outside Buenos Aires, according to independent Argentine news agency Diarios y Noticias and the newspaper La Nacion.

That SSPX booted Williamson from his position is not in and of itself amazing, especially in the context of its other actions, which include scrubbing its website of “inconvenient” articles, such as one blaming the Jews for deicide. What I’ve come to find fascinating in the interim since I last wrote is the very concept of a Holocaust denier recanting. What, exactly, would that mean? Is it possible for a Holocaust denier to be sincere in recanting under orders? I started to get an inkling of the possible answers in, of all places, an interview with Bishop Williamson published in Der Spiegel yesterday:

SPIEGEL: The Vatican is demanding that you retract your denial of the Holocaust, and it is threatening to not allow you to resume your activities as a bishop. How will you react?

Williamson: Throughout my life, I have always sought the truth. That is why I converted to Catholicism and became a priest. And now I can only say something, the truth of which I am convinced. Because I realize that there are many honest and intelligent people who think differently, I must now review the historical evidence once again. I said the same thing in my interview with Swedish television: Historical evidence is at issue, not emotions. And if I find this evidence, I will correct myself. But that will take time.

Brilliant! Well, not really. It’s a rather transparent attempt to play for time, all the while painting himself as seemingly reasonable. He just wants do do more research! In fact, reading what he said, I can’t seem to shake an image of O.J. searching relentlessly for the “real” killer of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman, never to be deterred until he finds the proof he needs. Or, I feel amusement like that of Michael Moynihan that comes from thinking “of a nutter like Williamson ‘reviewing’ historical data on the Holocaust, a subject that has been covered in great depth by historians like Christopher Browning, Saul Friedlander, Raul Hilberg, and Hans Mommsen, all of whom are slightly more qualified to render judgement on the subject.” When faced with the overwhelming mass of evidence that the Nazi regime undertook a systematic, industrialized program of mass murder designed to purge Europe of Jews, how will he react? Will he think that maybe–just maybe–he was wrong when he proclaimed that there were no gas chambers and that the number of Jews killed by the Nazis was nowhere near six million, that number being in his view a huge exaggeration? Or will he, like brave, brave Sir Robin, quickly turn his tail and flee? I think you know the answer. He will “research” the Holocaust the same way that the incompetent self-proclaimed “execution expert” Fred Leuchter “researched” the Holocaust, except that, unlike Leuchter, he can’t even trouble himself to actually go to Auschwitz:

SPIEGEL: How can an educated Catholic deny the Holocaust?

Williamson: I addressed the subject in the 1980s. I had read various writings at the time. I cited the Leuchter report (eds. note: a debunked theory produced in the 1980s claiming erroneously that the Nazi gas chambers were technically impractical) in the interview, and it seemed plausible to me. Now I am told that it has been scientifically refuted. I plan now to look into it.

SPIEGEL: You could travel to Auschwitz yourself.

Williamson: No, I will not travel to Auschwitz. I’ve ordered the book by Jean-Claude Pressac. It’s called “Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers.” A printout is now being sent to me, and I will read it and study it.

SPIEGEL: The Society of Saint Pius X has set an ultimatum for the end of February. Are you not risking a break with the group?

Williamson: In the Old Testament, the Prophet Jonah tells the sailors when their ship is in distress: ” Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea; so shall the sea be calm unto you: for I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you.” The Society has a religious mission that is suffering because of me. I will now examine the historic evidence. If I do not find it convincing, I will do everything in my power to avoid inflicting any further harm on the Church and the Society.

Don’t you just love the “persecution gambit” that Holocaust deniers love to play, how they love to don the mantle of free speech and portray themselves as nothing more than humble seekers of the truth?

Of course, here is where the problem with ordering a Holocaust denier to “recant” comes in. If Williamson were simply to obey the orders of the Pope and SSPX and publicly say something like, “Sorry about all that Holocaust denial since the 1980s; I didn’t really mean it, and the Holocaust did really happen,” it would be mind-numbingly obvious that his statement would be utterly insincere and that he would be making it only because he was ordered to. In other words, his “recantation” would be a lie, and if the Pope and SSPX accepted it they would be accepting a lie. If I thought there was any chance that Williamson would be willing and able to examine the evidence fairly and actually open himself to the possibility of changing his mind in response to it, I might find his desire to reexamine the evidence admirable, except that I know that the evidence for the Holocaust was just as strong 25 years ago as it is now. Williamson screwed up his “review” of the evidence back in the 1980s. What makes anyone think he could get it right now?

But notice how, even though it clearly means a lot to him to be officially part of the Church again, Williamson will not go out of his way to “do research” on the Holocaust. He will not travel. He has picked a single source that, apparently, if he finds it “unconvincing,” will allow him to hold fast to his current Holocaust denial. Notice how he makes lame excuses for not doing the research, for example, his all but saying, “Well, the book I want to read for my research hasn’t arrived. Never mind that he has a blog, meaning that he uses the Internet. If he has Internet access there is a wealth of material readily available to him that he could use to begin his research, starting with, ironically enough, the very book he is seeking, which has been reprinted with permission in its entirety on The Holocaust History Project website and at Mazal.org. He can pick either site and then just read the book on his computer screen. If he’s the old-fashioned type (and, it would appear, virtually all SSPX clergy are pretty “old-fashioned” kinds of guys, as in 16th century old-fashioned), he could print it out and read it on good, old-fashioned paper.

No, no, Williamson doesn’t need to thank me. I’m more than happy to help out.

Again, Williamson needn’t thank me or Professor Lipstadt. We’re both more than happy to help.

It is clear that Bishop Williamson’s Holocaust denial is not a new phenomenon. It has clearly been built up over at least two or three decades. It is clearly a highly ingrained belief. You can almost feel him building a wall that would prevent any new evidence that conflicts with his world view from entering his mind or influencing his thought.

By concentrating on a single book on the operation of the Auschwitz gas chambers, Williamson is showing a mindset that is common to many cranks, namely that of thinking that there must be one single “magic bullet” of evidence that either proves or disproves a something, be it a series of events over 12 years in history or a scientific theory. By way of comparison, consider how creationists, be they the “intelligent design” or “young earth” variety, deal with evolution. They pick apart single strands of evidence, thinking that any weaknesses in a single strand disproves the theory of evolution. For example, if there is a questionable bit of evidence in the fossil record, they’ll zero right in on that, ignoring all the other evidence that supports evolution. Think of how HIV/AIDS denialists deal with the science of HIV. They’ll point to any study that doesn’t fit quite so neatly in with the existing paradigm, zero in on it like a laser, and say that it “discredits” the HIV/AIDS hypothesis. Consider antivaccinationists. They will pick apart minor flaws in the studies that fail to find an association between vaccines and autism, and ignore the rest of the data.

The historicity of the Holocaust does not depend upon whether there were gas chambers at Auschwitz, anyway, although that factory of industrialized murder contributed up to 20% of the total number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. The historicity of the Holocaust is supported by multiple converging strands of evidence from many sources, including Nazi documents, eyewitness accounts, forensic studies, among others. Similarly, the HIV/AIDS hypothesis does not depend upon any one study, but rather hundreds–nay, thousands–of studies approaching the question whether and how HIV causes AIDS from various directions and disciplines and nearly all converge on the same conclusion: HIV causes AIDS. The same is true of evolution, which is supported by many lines of evidence from many disciplines that all converge upon the same broad conclusion of common descent by which every creature alive today evolved through natural selection and other mechanisms and through which every living creature is related. Creationists may find single bits of evidence that may have been misinterpreted or that don’t fit neatly into what they consider to be an evolutionary niche and claim that they somehow “discredit Darwin,” but ignore the convergence of evidence from numerous disciplines, including paleontology, archaeology, anthropology, genetics, molecular biology, geology, and others, that converge upon the theory of evolution by natural selection.

Unfortunately, demanding that a Holocaust denier like Williamson “recant” is nearly always a useless and futile exercise. Cranks like creationists, Holocaust deniers, HIV/AIDS denialists, antivaccinationists, 9/11 Truthers, and the like tend to be so attached to their views that the likelihood of “recantation” is slim. Their world view is too much a part of who they are. They go out of their way to construct an edifice that seems, at least to the, internally self-consistent and logical, even if it goes against established science and, from the outside, is even self-contradictory. That’s because crankery such as this is almost always constructed against something rather than for something. Holocaust denial is designed to be a weapon against the Jews, as a prominent Holocaust denier in essence admitted just last month. Creationism is designed to combat evolution because certain fundamentalist religious people do not like the implications of evolutionary theory, which refute their religious beliefs regarding the creation of the world, the origin of life, and the uniqueness of man compared to animals. HIV/AIDS denialism is arguably a reaction against the implications of HIV causing AIDS, namely that a virus, not immorality, causes AIDS, given that the usual “alternative” hypothesis preferred by HIV/AIDS denialists is that some combination of drug use and promiscuity somehow “weakens the immune system” and causes the syndrome.

So is it ever possible for a true crank like Williamson to realize he is wrong? It’s difficult, and usually requires a lot of help. However, it is not impossible. For example, Jean-Claude Pressac, who wrote the very book that Williamson is searching for in order to read, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, was once a Holocaust “revisionist.” He changed his mind, and even describes how he went from being a Holocaust denier to writing one of the definitive works on Auschwitz. Pressac shows that “conversion” (not a great word, given its religious connotations, but the only one I could think of at the moment) is possible. However, by and large, the truly committed cranks, the Williamsons, the Michael Behes, the J.B. Handleys, the Michael Egnors, the Christine Maggiores of the world do not change their minds.

Does that mean it’s a complete waste of time to try to persuade such people? If your goal is to change their minds, probably. However, if in doing so by publicly refuting their arguments (for example, on a blog), there remains the possibility that you might be able to persuade those who are not committed cranks, who might believe the blandishments of the cranks because–well, because they don’t know any better. That’s one reason why I remain engaged in a constant battle to explain why, for example, antivaccinationists and “alternative” medicine advicates are wrong about the science. I have no illusion that I’ll persuade Jenny McCarthy or J.B. Handley that their arguments are a load of pseudoscientific rubbish and even downright lies. However, I hope that parents who read my Respectful and not-so-Respectful refutations of such nonsense will see just how bad their reasoning is. Similarly, refuting Holocaust deniers can provide evidence to counter the misinformation that cranks like Williamson use to persuade people of their cause and maybe–just maybe–on rare occasions persuade a crank to rethink his position and rejoin the world of the rational.

That’s why I hope that Williamson actually gets Deborah Lipstadt’s letter and reads it. I hope against hope that he does indeed evaluate the sources she provided. I hope that he figures out that Pressac’s book on the Auschwitz gas chambers is freely available on the web, thanks to The Holocaust History Project.

It’s a slim hope, but I have to believe it’s possible to persuade a man like Williamson to recant and actually mean it, even if it is incredibly unlikely ever to happen.

149 Comments

Thanks, I often just want to throw my hands in the air and walk away from creepy loons like that – I feel tainted just being in their presence – but you provide sound reason to keep trying. Someone, of that opinion somewhere, might get it.

In the back of their minds it comes down to “So the Nazis killed 6,000,000 Jews! So what?” That wouldn’t sound so good in today’s world, so they erect an elaborate structure of lies to deny it ever happened instead. Maybe a few of them have actually convinced themselvesâbut for a lot of them it’s a cynical ploy.

I admire anybody who has the guts to get into the front lines on this issue. Some of these deniers are really nasty people. On the other hand, I can attest that if you foolishly point out that the Nazis came a lot closer to their goal of exterminating all the Gypsies in Europe than they did with the Jews, you’re going to get the flesh stripped from your bones by the other side. This is like wading into an alligator pit. Keep up the good work, Oracâand Professor Lipstadt and everybody else.

Writing history gets a lot easier when you decide what the story is and then find the evidence necessary to back it up. However, “easier” does not mean “better”; all that sort of history does is back up the story the writer wants to tell, making it a closed loop useful only as propaganda.

Real history looks at all the evidence and then tries to tease meaning out of that. This is the kind of history that makes us learn.

Real history cannot be refuted (or proved) by a single work. Only the cheap knock-off version can… so if someone tries to show you a book that “proves/disproves” some aspect of history it’s time to dial your critical thinking level up to “HI”.

(Sadly, the conspiracy types seem to work that in reverse, and dial critical thinking down when presented the “one, true story” that refutes all the others that they don’t happen to like.)

Because I studied cognition, especially memory, I understand how the present “transforms” the past, similar ideas and events melt and weld together, and emotions overpower realistic appraisals. Without out solid data, we’re lost.

“Multiple strands of converging evidence from many sources”. Indeed.

Orac’s description of cranks of all stripes conjures an image for me:

There is a remarkably solid building**, built of well-hewn blocks: this is *Science*, built upon a foundation of *Statistical Anaylsis* (cue heavenly music). This edifice has taken many decades to build and is being refined continuously: its upkeep is meticulous and costly. Even the grounds around it are perfection, filled with fountains.

At night, cranks sneak around its periphery, one has a pick axe and chips away at a corner of the building, putting his “findings” in a bag and scurries off. Another infamously “chisels” away at a tiny crevice he has found. A woman takes a metal rasp and scrapes some dust from a column and puts it in her purse. No one has even *looked* at its foundation. Or went inside to explore to its many chambers and halls. Or contemplated the many treasures in its library.

Our “chipper”,”chisler” and “scraper” present their “science” to the public: they have chips and dust. Much of the public, being unfamiliar with the building, its foundation, and grounds, accept their words. A lively trade is born in dust and chips, enriching our creative defacers.

Time to install security cams. May I suggest one called, * Nouveau Journo*, doesn’t cost much.

** looks something like the Department of Agriculture in Washington, for some reason.

In the back of their minds it comes down to “So the Nazis killed 6,000,000 Jews! So what?” That wouldn’t sound so good in today’s world, so they erect an elaborate structure of lies to deny it ever happened instead.

I think there’s two things which cause people to actually believe it, rather than (or in addition to) not wanting to admit that they don’t care that (or even approve that) that many Jews were killed:

1) The Jews are secretly running the whole world, and they wouldn’t have allowed 6 million of their own to be murdered like that. Thus it couldn’t have happened.

2) The Jews are evil, and thus nothing could ever have happened to them which would make them seem sympathetic or pitiable. Thus the Holocaust couldn’t have happened.

The “witnesses” claim that 2,000 people were packed in a room so tightly that they stood upright even after death and that the children were thrown on top of this mass of people to fill the space between their heads and the ceiling.

Now tell us, mister surgeon, how much time these people have before they are out of oxygene to breath ?

Tell me, mister surgeon/scientist, do you also “believe” the famous “witness” Elie Weisel’s claim that he could tell the nationality of the victims by the color of the smoke coming out of the crematorium chimney ?

According to Goofus’ logic, if 30 stab wounds are enough to kill any person, any murder that was committed with 31 or more stab wounds is actually a fake and the person’s still alive. Seriously, that’s the “logic” behind their argument. “The method of execution was overkill; therefore, there was obviously no execution at all.”

As for the follow-up fewmet, it’s akin to suggesting that the existence of one person who believes the old “ER admissions and police calls spike when the moon is full” chestnut means that there have in fact never been emergency room admissions or police calls. Again, the “logic” is bizarre: “If you disagree with the existence of a pattern that someone else thought they saw in a set of events, then obviously there were no events at all.”

Now that is a good one ! The Germans should have stabed them! Very cost effective indeed! No need for the construction of complicated gas chambers, no need for crematoriums to eliminate the “evidence” of cyanide, etc..etc..

And best of all the jews would have stabed them for the Germans. Ain’t the jewish “witnesses” all say they undressed, gased, search, and cremated the victims themselves for the germans ? Yes indeed that is what they say ! Sonderkomandos they say they were !

I dont think any nation or people ever agreed to do this to their own kind in all of human history !

Hey ! The jewish russian soviets (NKVD) used a single bullet to the neck to kill 15,000 polish officers at Katyn.

While the german “barbarian overkillers” were making the first jet plane and the V2 rockets !

I bet you also believe Moses split the waters of the Nile ! How about flying saucers and the Lockness monster ?

Hate ? My dear Lawrence, I have commented on the subject and presented my arguments. You had no counter-arguments to contradict them. You have only used attacks on my caracter and relations. You are simply incappable of adressing the subject. The hate comes from you.

I only have pity for your incompetence and mediocrity. Pity is not hate.

This may be a first: a denialist so in denial that they deny the actual definition of denial.

I think our repugnant visitor is attempting what we might call “cargo-cult repartee” – he has no actual ability to put together a sensible argument or defend the arguments he makes, but he has a vague idea of the outer appearances of such things, and thinks that if he mimics the outward forms of intelligent debate and wit, the inner essence will magically fill itself in.

I dont think any nation or people ever agreed to do this to their own kind in all of human history !

Then I think you don’t know much of human history. It is full of large groups of people doing nasty things to other people of the same country, sometimes even to their own family members. In pre-Columbian America, Aztec human sacrifices come to mind (not just prisoners of war, but also local people, including children).
In Europe, there was the Inquisition and various religious crusades (no, not the ones who went to Jerusalem – the ones which ended up in Europe, like the crusade against the Albigeois, or the crusade which was sidetracked into plundering Constantinople, a Christian city).
We can also throw in a few large-scale civil wars. The religious wars in France and not-yet Germany were bloody local affairs. And no, the fact that these were wars doesn’t excuse the mass murder of civilians that occured during these conflicts. There were deliberate, planned mass murders, like the Saint-Barthelemy.

Of course, in most of these conflicts, people were not murdering “their own kind”. No, no, these were heretics. Or something. Never mind that they have been living alongside one another for a few generations.

Hetiantus, Aztec human sacrifice was not at the profit or to the service of another nation. Inquisition either. Same for civil wars.

You missed the central point.

The jewish “witnesses” claim they accepted to do those horrible acts for the profit of the nazis in exchange for a meal a day. They even claim they accepted and succeded in hiding all physical proof of the holocaust to the profit of the nazis.

So, you can accuse me of denying this as long as you want, I simply dont believe that crap. The jewish sect is made up of a bunch of sociopaths due to childhood endoctrination, but they are not those monsters the “witnesses” are portraying with their ridiculous stories grossely and clumsily concocted.

Those stories were made-up by ignorant immature people under the inluence of soviet propagandists.

Mr. Tremblay, in case you didn’t notice, Orac supports the free speech of Holocaust deniers. Otherwise, you use your martyrdom to cover your lack of evidence. Seriously, your entire arguments are built on character assassination without evidence and somehow not knowing what the word “denial” means.

Of course, just because the principle of free speech would allow someone to say things contradicted by fact without fear of government action, there’s no reason people have to “listen” without disagreeing.

The jewish “witnesses” claim they accepted to do those horrible acts for the profit of the nazis in exchange for a meal a day.

And keeping their own sorry life, also for a day.

Funny how you forget that the nazis were also pointing a gun at the people while making this proposition. “You are my slave, or you are dead meat, like those over there”.
Funny how, eventually, they found some people to do the dirty work. It’s difficult to be courageous then confronted to the harsh reality of your immediate fate should you not be co-operative.

Soviet endoctrination? Please. I’m from a country which has been invaded by the nazis. We have some very good records of what they were able to do. We even have kept the ruins of a few churches (burned with the village’s inhabitants in it, elders and children included). We are also missing quite a high number of Jews (plus some gypsies and a handful of political opponents, but who is keeping count?), which our governement – and our police force – was pretty zealous in rounding up and handing over to the nazis, even before they were really asking for them.
My grandma witnessed a number of “arrests”. It decided her to go into the local resistance (modestly – she was just carrying food around). 40 years after, she was still unable to walk into some streets of her city. Watching whole families being arrested and sent God knows where left her with some very traumatic memories.
Well, not as traumatic as to what happened to the arrested people.

I know an eye-witness to the atrocities; my grandfather. No, he was not a Jew. He’s a Lutheran, actually, though at the time he was more or less nonspecific Protestant. He was a Minnesotan, grandson of Swedish immigrants, and he signed up with the National Guard in hopes of furthering his education. There was this plan to recruit some of the best and brightest to help rebuild Europe after WWII. The plan changed; most of them ended on Omaha Beach instead, including my grandfather. He was lucky enough not to be in the initial surge. He ended up serving three tours in Europe; towards the end, he had the horror of helping liberate a concentration camp. They were quite real, and quite horrific.

“I’m from a country which has been invaded by the nazis. We have some very good records of what they were able to do. We even have kept the ruins of a few churches (burned with the village’s inhabitants in it, elders and children included). We are also missing quite a high number of Jews (plus some gypsies and a handful of political opponents, but who is keeping count?), which our governement – and our police force – was pretty zealous in rounding up and handing over to the nazis, even before they were really asking for them.”

That is total bull. If he was for free speech, he would have open discussion with people who dont “believe” in the holocaust tale. His text on Williamson is strictly charater assassination and calomny.

“so all those wharehouses full of documents are all faked”(historygeek)

Not faked. For real, in your imagination.

“Contrary to what people generally believed, the real âevidenceâ for the holocaust âfits into a small shoe box.â That ridiculous piece of âevidenceâ (Statement of Kurt Gerstein) is still the best evidence there is for the âholocaust.”

Robert Wolfe director of the Military Branch of the National Archives in Washington, DC.

France, actually. My point was to cite a country outside of the full force of the soviets’ propaganda influence.

For the burned church, I was thinking of Ouradour.
My grandma was from Lyon, a city which was to become famous for the presence of a German torturer, Klaus Barbie, and as a meeting place (and battleground) for French resistants, notably the former Prefet Jean Moulin, who would die in the hands of Barbie.
You have museums or memorials in these places.

The Vichy governement was very zealous in pleasing the invaders. One of the most known joint actions was the “rafle du Vel d’Hiv”, where more than 13000 Jews were rounded up by the German force with the active help of the French police, and then deported.

The first time, the nazi didn’t asked to round up jewish children, too. Children cries coming out of cattle wagons was making German people living along the railway line wondering what was happening.
The French governement rounded them up anyway.

As a matter of personal dark irony, we have now in Lyon a University Jean Moulin. Which has become, of all things, famous for chairing a revisionist professor.

It appears Mr. Tremblay has a bizarre definition of “freedom of speech”. Last I checked, “open discussion” was not part of the definition. And if he needs evidence, he can look at the “Combating Holocaust Denial” column of links on the side, as can anyone else. Here’s one: http://www.holocaustdenialontrial.com/

Of course, his idea of an argument is to insist no group could be so evil, then insist that the Jews and Soviets were anyway.

“And keeping their own sorry life, also for a day.”(Hetiantus)
Exactly. While the allies were GIVING their’s in the trenches to SAVE others !

I wonder how you will fare with a pistol next to your brain. It’s always very easy to ask other people to sacrifice themselves.
I also guess that all the Jews who died in the resistance (like in the Warsow ghetto upraising) or among the allies don’t count.

That is total bull. If he was for free speech, he would have open discussion with people who dont “believe” in the holocaust tale.

I believe it was Dachau, or one of its satellites — I’m not sure which. I know he was in Munich at the end of the war, and that’s close by. The next time I see him, I will ask if I can. It’s a difficult subject to ask about, because it always makes him very, very angry. And he’s not a man who is often angry. He hated Germans with a visceral passion for a long time after that.

Why did he hate them so?

Read the Wikipedia article about Dachau. (The camp, not the town — there are articles for both.) It talks about dragging residents of the town in to see the camp, forcing them to witness the horrors. It talks about forcing SS officers to lie in piles of dead bodies — that’s a story he’s told me directly, and it’s actually more gruesome than what Wikipedia recounts; he says they made an officer and his mistress crawl across bodies until they were vomiting, and then made them crawl further. War crimes, most likely, and indeed charges were filed against the US officers involved. But the charges were ultimately dismissed, perhaps out of recognition that this was something too horrible to witness and be unmoved.

Dachau was not one of the execution camps, yet still tens of thousands died of the sheer brutality of the camp itself. It did not specialize in Jews, though it did incarcerate a great many Jews. This camp had been opened originally for political prisoners and filled beyond capacity well before the Final Solution was suggested. In addition to Jews, it also incarcerated Christians who had refused to change allegiance to the new German church; homosexuals or alleged homosexuals; Gypsies; communist sympathizers; and basically anyone else the Nazis felt had relinquished their right to human dignity and respect.

It is hard to believe that something so evil could have happened. How could Germans be so evil? Well, the truth is that most Germans *weren’t* so evil. They were incurious. A couple of the most interesting museums I visited on my trip to Germany were both in Berlin — “The Story of Berlin” and the concentration camp there. (Orenenburg, I think is the name. I gotta run an errand in a moment, so I don’t have time to look up the correct spelling.) I finally started to understand how this vast, horrific evil could get established and become so powerful. In a nutshell, Hitler was a very astute politician and able to exploit the tendency of good people to give him and his party the benefit of the doubt. He was also able to play very well on people’s fears, on their national pride (the humiliation of WWI and the Treaty of Versailles was a big factor), and on the fact that people are generally pretty complacent as long as they feel their needs are being met.

“Wow – to quote a favorite movie of mine, “all that hate is going to burn you up inside.””

The problem is that this hate speech burns down buildings with others inside.

And fear of “censorship” is itself a censorship: the censorship of the majority who believe they are the good guys by the nutcase minority who are convinced that the majority are the bad guys and MUST be removed.

A more precise sentence would have been: “I wonder how you will fare if someone is pointing a pistol at you head”.
And I was in no way implying a threat or encouraging any form of violence toward Mr Tremblay.

My point was just that he seems to keep forgetting this little detail in his self-righteous condemnation of people for not having the guts to stand up to their executionners, and die a useless death.
Nazis have shown they were no afraid of torture. If all prisonners choose immediate death over false hope, the goalers would just have been more “assertive”. I understand they were already quite convincing.

On the other hand, I understand why suicidal prisoners would be quite convenient. If all of these annoying witnesses have had the good grace to die instead of reporting these events…

“My point was just that he seems to keep forgetting this little detail in his self-righteous condemnation of people for not having the guts to stand up to their executionners, and die a useless death.”(Heliantus)

It takes guts to refuse to kill our own family ?

Refusing to do so is a useless death ?

You are the one missing the point, here, Heliantus.

This argument proves the holocaust is just a tale. A bad tale.

The nazi could not do this without the complete cooperation of the jews.

This is my central argument against the holocaust tale.

If you believe it, then you are admiting the jews are as sadistically guilty as the nazis.

1:1 – World banking and the US Federal Reserve are controlled by the Rothschild family
3:2 – HIV doesn’t cause AIDS
2:1 – 9/11 was false flag operation
4:1 – Vaccines are a cynical plot to control the masses
9:2 – No American has walked on the moon
8:1 – Bigfoot definitely exists
25:1 – Time is actually a cube

“Mr. Tremblay, it’s very clear you’ve never had your life on the line, or known anyone who did. If you did, you would not be so casual in dismissing their actions as you did. You disgust me.”(Grey Falcon)

so because of a poor understanding of the goings on of the gas chamber you beleive that the holcaust was faked. what about the people that where gunned down in mass graves they all died with there family. except a small few that to there horror lived. the people that pulled the tigger where german. then there are the ones that where put in the back of trucks and gassed from the tail pipe the people that put them there where germans. your knowledge of the holcaust is profoundly lacking and i check the national archives they have 20 million text pages for holcaust assest alone. that would be the plunder part

This isn’t about egotism, this is about reality. What I find especially disgusting is that you’ve forgotten something critical in that story. Once you’ve been killed, your family would be killed anyway. Senseless sacrifice was always a virtue amongst your kind, which is why you can never win.

Then why did you ask? Clearly it was important — right up until the point where you realized I might actually be able to get a concrete answer to your question. At that point, suddenly it’s not important anymore. Could it be you are avoiding facing truth? If you care about this, it *should* be important. And you act as if you care. Either you are lying for your own amusement (which I doubt) or you on some level realize that your position is threatened.

Don’t be afraid. Never be afraid of the truth. Be afraid of not knowing the truth, and doing wrong because of it. There are still a few Germans left old enough to remember the Nazis, and how they pulled the wool over an entire nation. They’ll tell you why the truth is important.

Difficult subject for him ? Why ? Did he do something wrong over there ?

He was 19 when he landed on Omaha Beach. There are things no one should have to see, and war truly is hell. But war is also, sometimes, necessary, and someone has to see those things, and do those things, and pay the price for the rest of us. Learning the true depths of man’s inhumanity to man could not have been easy for him. I cannot fathom what it was like to see that, to smell the stench of rotting bodies in that typhoid-ridden camp, to look back to the houses where average Germans had lived in relative comfort until the last days of the war, and to be overcome by fury that they had allowed this to happen because they were not sufficiently curious. Indeed, he could not understand how even a lack of curiosity could have kept them ignorant of the horrific scale of what was going on.

Why ? You are not even sure it was Dachau.

I know it was either Dachau or one of the satellite camps; I’m just not sure whether it was the main camp or not. They’re all covered in the Wikipedia article. Seriously — if you really care about this subject and aren’t just blowing smoke, you should read it. (While you’re at it, read “Citizen Soldiers”; it tells of the men like my grandfather, who joined the National Guard and then got sent to be cannon fodder during the Normandy invasion. That book was one of the things that finally got my grandfather talking about the war, because it gave him somewhere to start.)

Most kapos didn’t know, at first. Whenever a batch of prisoners arrived, the goalers separated men from women and children, and then kept a few men aside. Except for those latter men, everybody was then sent to the gas chambers.

The surviving men were conducted around the chamber, to the exit. And when the doors opened on a pile of corpses, they were ordered to clean the mess. Those who refused were killed.
After having been through that, accepting to herd the next batch of prisonners was not so difficult a decision.
For what I know, the nazis may even have successfully convinced some people to kill their own family. Eh, life as a goaler is not that fun, you have to find some entertainment.

And yes, victims helping their executionners is horrible and despicable and deshumanizing. Unfortunately, it doesn’t equate with not happening.
I wonder why the nazis were doing it. Oh yeah, they were bent on treating their prisonners like non-humans.
Apparently, it did work.

Refusing to do so is a useless death ?

Well, it’s not going to change anything about the fate of your relatives. They are dead anyway.
To help you take the “right” decision, an experienced torturer could simply threaten to kill them more painfully than you would, I’m sure it was working wonder after a few messy demonstrations. We call this sadism.

It was France who declared war on Germany, Hetiantus !
Invaders ? LOL!!!

Reality revision, sir?
Who declared a war on who is a separate matter, and I would even claim that the one declaring war is often the defender, not the attacker.
The German army was in France, not the other way round. It was a well-planned invasion, carefully designed to get around our defenses.
This, by my book, define the Germans as invaders.

“1:1 – World banking and the US Federal Reserve are controlled by the Rothschild family”

World banking is a cartel, so it is a group.

“3:2 – HIV doesn’t cause AIDS”

There are lots of causes for deficiency of the immune system. HIV is not the only one.

“2:1 – 9/11 was false flag operation”

The attack on the King David Hotel by jews disguised as arabs was one. The attack on the USS Liberty by jews was also one. Good things come in threes ?

“4:1 – Vaccines are a cynical plot to control the masses”

Vaccines are usefull, but they have a price.

“9:2 – No American has walked on the moon”

For the americans to create a fabrication about that, they would need to be in a political position where not landing on the moon would equal total lost of legimity. There is nothing in that effect. A fabrication would be a one time deal. There are numerous Appolo missions. Information from those missions could not have been fabricated because of facts unknowned at the time.

Quite the contrary for the holocaust tale.

“8:1 – Bigfoot definitely exists”

Lots of pictures and films to prove it, just like the holocaust ! LOL!

“so because of a poor understanding of the goings on of the gas chamber you beleive that the holcaust was faked.”(history Geek)

Poor understanding by whom ?

Holocaust faked ? No. I did not see any faked holocaust. It has never even be reproduced in movies ! This is comprehensible since the testimonies defy so much the physical laws of nature, that the movie would feel like sci-fi-computer-generated. False.

The official claims are so incompatible with physics that no special effects could render them believable.

“If your family’s life & honour was worth more to you than your own, you would not propagate the great lie of Holocaust denial. Your perseverance in such deceit does them a great dishonour.”(Composer99)

I thought Canadians hated being referred to as “Americans.” I mean, you do live on the same continent, but I can tell by your inflection in your writing that English isn’t your first language – and your other postings around the Internetz reflect a very pro-Quebec political stance (among your other ravings), so I call shennanigans on your previous post.

Again, don’t let those jewish boogeymen (or should I say gholems) get you.

i think you what you fail to understand is that they way this works is that you have 3 kids if you kill the other two live is you refuse they all die in front of you. make your choice all you options suck. this is forced upon but outside agents. this is not the only time in history this happened there is the arminian genside most of north american rowanda. hell in the former congo they get there point acorss buy BBQ your kid and makeing you eat them. they don’t give you gun. or for those french what about carllie in the hundered years war. they kicked the elderly and woman and childern out when the food was running low in the middle of a saige in the middle of winter. and you still haven’t proved that edivinced hits in a shoe box i just proved there 20 million pages for recovering assests that are pulled from 30 agancy’s in the US alone also the french lost got there ass handed to them and had to kiss Nazi ass so much for being the hero

It happened many times. Sophie’s Choice wasn’t even an unusual circumstance.

And as much as we like to think otherwise, the Holocaust was not actually an aberration. Perhaps it helps to keep us sane, believing that cannot happen, but it happened — and more than once in a single generation. Stalin did it too; ironically, in some ways, Hitler was more like the Communists that he despised than he would ever have admitted. After the war, the Soviets took over administration of the eastern portion of the former Nazi territories, thus setting the stage for the Eastern Bloc and the Iron Curtain and the whole messy Cold War. They liberated the concentration camps on their side, just as the Americans and British liberated the camps on the western side. But the Soviets didn’t actually close the camps; they repurposed them. Instead of housing Jews or Gypsies or people who were inconvenient to the Nazis, now they held German POWs. (Ironic, that.) The conditions were slightly better, mostly because they weren’t as crowded. But it wasn’t a lot better. And the camps were in shambles due to looting of the structures by German civilians desperate for firewood.

The camp I was trying to remember the correct spelling of is actually Sachsenhausen, in Oranienburg, a suburb of Berlin. It was the first of the camps, opened in 1936. This was the camp I visited during my trip to Germany in 2001. About 30,000 people died there. Like Dachau, it was not officially an extermination camp. But as the first of the camps, it was also the model and the testbed; methods of mass execution were tested and validated there for use at camps such as Auschwitz. After the war, it remained in operation; after releasing its prisoners, the Soviets moved a POW camp into there, and began running it as a gulag. About 12,000 are estimated to have died there during the Soviet occupation. It was finally shut down for good in 1950.

Mr. Tremblay, when I commented on your posts I believed my statements should have been entirely clear to you. However, it appears that you did not fully comprehend what I have written, so please, tell me what parts you did not understand and I shall do my best to clarify them.

Of course, there are some points of yours that I would like for you to clarify, as well. For example, why do you believe we are immoral? Is there anything specific, or do you just feel everyone who disagrees with you is evil?

They are very precise about it. They did it all themselves, for the nazis.

One of them even admit that at Sobibor he and his crew of fellow jews, decided to pospone a planed escape because first they wanted to finish the job of cleaning the evidence of the bodies (unearth them and burn them) for the nazis, and that more trains were scheduled to arrive. Only when they took care of this did they made their escape.

If you see nothing wrong in that script, there is something wrong with you.

The only thing I see wrong is you, Mr. Tremblay. Seriously, if you never had your own life on the line, don’t criticize others for not doing what you claim you would have done. In many cases, it was a) Their families die cleanly at their hands, or b) Their families would face the Nazis. Pray you never have to make such a choice.

I can’t believe I tried to engage someone like Tremblay. He’s never given us a single citation or reference, and he somehow thinks the entire evidence for the Holocaust is contained in a single shoebox! Does he really think we’ll trust the word of some random stranger on the internet? Seriously?

Correction: He hasn’t given us a citation or reference that can’t be debunked with a few minutes searching, and somehow thinks that the entire evidence for the Holocaust can fit in a single shoebox, as if somehow mass graves don’t count as evidence.

Mr Tremblay, you are basing your opinion (which you call your knowledge) of the Holocaust on a witness’s account. We base ours on many witnesses’ accounts. It is true that some people have weird claims about the Holocaust. There are people with weird claims about everything. Why do you pick the claims of a few over the claims of tens of thousands of survivors? Is it perhaps because you are picking the ones that support your preconceived notions? Your “suppositions on the matter”?

You have clearly led a very sheltered life. That is fortunate, and I am happy for you. But if you believe everyone lives as you do, then you make it possible for more evils to occur unopposed, simply because you do not believe they could be happening. You think Jews would manufacture evidence of the Holocaust (lord knows how, given the tremendous scale of the evidence that was uncovered and their almost complete lack of political and economic power at the time) — but you do not think they would commit a mercy killing to spare their loved ones agony? How is the latter inconceivable to you but the former completely reasonable?

I could pick a controversial topic within the Holocaust and pimp it to troll internet threads, such as Scott Lively (Ugandan Gay Murderer) and his “Pink Swastika”.

Hey, I know, the gay Nazi’s shamed the gay Jews and made them kill millions of other Jews! I’ll go around to random blogs until I find one where they think Scott Lively is a piece of trash, and then I’ll pimp my theory and never acknowledge that it is total complete crap. I’ll win debates by just being a total dick! Just wait, I’ll be a brazillionaire within a month!

Here is a perfect example of an individual who ignores the mountains of evidence (such as the transcripts and evidence presented at the Nuremburg Trials), interviews from tens of thousands of both survivors and participants (again, as part of the post-war trials), the physical evidence that exists today, the millions upon millions of records, detailed reports, photographs, and everything else, to focus upon one very small part of the overall Holocaust & pick at any little inconsistency to find fault.

There is no reasoning with this individual – he is too busy hiding from the jewish boogeymen.

The real reason the escape at Sobibor was postponed was that a train with SS, not Jews, arrived the day the escape was supposed to happen.

Trembler’s other assertions are similarly distorted.

I bet if Trembler had a gun to his child’s head, he would choose to gas his neighbor to save his child. I would even bet that he would choose to save his child over his mother – and his mother would beg him to choose to save the child as well.

This is what Williamson and the rest of us are required by law, in Germnany and other european countries, to believe.

Bomba say the gas chamber he was cutting hair in was 12 x 12 feet. That is about the size of my master bedroom ! He say they were 16 barbers in there with 16 stools in front of them. I have difficulty imagining how this could fitï»¿ in my bedroom ! He goes on to say that up to 150 women, with their children, came in that room all at once to get a hair cut.

The gas chamber scene in Escape from Sobibor is from the outside only. We dont see inside.

They show some big black smoke coming out from the building and the people inside screaming. That does not make any sense. Carbon monoxide is odorless. A diesel engin could produce this soot, but also produce much less carbon monoxide than a petrol engin. The witnesses say it was a petrol engin.

No reason to gas them in a special area when they could gas them in their barracks and not even notice it.

A petrol engin is stupid because it produces only 200ppm of the gas and would require an hour to kill. Witnesses say they were dead in ten minutes !

A small wood BBQ produces 5,000ppm of the deadly gas. Much more efficient. Germans were keen on efficiency.

Bomba say the gas chamber he was cutting hair in was 12 x 12 feet. That is about the size of my master bedroom !

And he also said that it was approximate*.

He say they were 16 barbers in there with 16 stools in front of them.

Wrong. He specifically said it was benches, NOT stools.

I have difficulty imagining how this could fitï»¿ in my bedroom !

Pretty easy. Two benches, each seating 8 women, with barbers behind would still leave a 8×12 swath for other people.

He goes on to say that up to 150 women, with their children, came in that room all at once to get a hair cut.

Wrong. He said 60-70 women and children (about 4 per barber) at a time for haircuts, and then the gas chamber was filled after the barbers left with more that had already had their hair cut.

*holocaust museum models show the Treblinka gas chambers as being 5mx5m, or about 16’x16′. This would be sufficient space for the claim. The number of people in that space would make it feel much smaller than it actually was.

AutoCAD says you can. YIn fact, you can cram 70 people into a 7’x15′ space without compression (less then half the size of the room in question). You’re not going to be comfortable, but you can do it. And yes, there is enough space to allow the people at the back to get to the front.

We had to carry or drag the corpses on the run, since the slightest infraction of the rules meant a severe beating. The corpses had been lying around for quite some time and decomposition had already set in, making the air foul with the stench of decay. Already worms were crawling all over the bodies. It often happened that an arm or a leg fell off when we tied straps around them in order to drag the bodies away. Thus we worked from dawn to sunset, without food or water, on what some day would be our own graves. During the day it was very hot and we were tortured by thirst.

Under the conditions described (decomp and heat), this is in fact believable.

You’re an imbecile. Fuck off. Die in a fire. Go out and never come back. Because you were the waste of what should have been a very good wank! Do not respond to this, because if you do you will demonstrate that you are nothing but a twat. Which is of course what you are.

This is the last tale I would ever want to be true. As the son of a man who escaped Austria on the Kindertransport, and whose Jewish grandmother and aunt were hidden in Vienna by friends through the war, and who lost his grandfather to the Gestapo, I would love for this to be a lie. Sadly, it isn’t.

I’d like to think that my great Aunt and Uncle’s escape across Siberia was just a summer trip. But it wasn’t.

I’d love to laugh at the funny tattoo my friend Abe has on his arm. But I can’t.

I’d like to watch Night and Fog and be relieved because it was a fake. But I can’t.

I’d like to think how silly my father’s recollections of the Kristallnacht were. But I can’t.

Tell me, why do you want so badly that this tale be false? Do you understand that about yourself?

It’s not only the toxicity of prussian acid (zyclon), but how it kills.

It was produced for delousing. It takes 6 to 30 hours to kill insects, but only 10 minutes to kill a human. It is not because insects are more robust to it’s toxicity, but because a insect in a room has lots more oxygen available than a human in the same room. Zyclon simply affects the blood cels depriving them of oxygen.

If one could capture all the insects in the room and put them in a jar with a gram of zyclon, the insects would die as fast as a human in a room. But that would be stupid, because we only need to destroy the insects in the jar by closing it ! No need for zyclon. Zyclon is use against insects because we cant get to them.

Well, it is the same non-sense for all those people tight packed crowded in those supposed gas chambers. No need for zyclon. They will be out of oxygen soon enough.

The zyclone powder must not be touched after use or the person will die. So the tale of the guards pooring zyclon through a hole in the roof right on the people and sondercommandos coming in to take out the bodies right after is ridiculous. 20 hours are needed to aerate the room of the gas. And those bodies could not be touched. So zyclon use would have been stupid instead of just leaving them to die of asfixiation.

In delousing gas chambers (the real ones) zynclone was placed in thin layers on sheets of papers and carefully removed after 30 hours of aeration making sure not a gram was left.

It was produced for delousing. It takes 6 to 30 hours to kill insects, but only 10 minutes to kill a human. It is not because insects are more robust to it’s toxicity, but because a insect in a room has lots more oxygen available than a human in the same room. Zyclon simply affects the blood cels depriving them of oxygen.

Biology fail. Insects require concentrations up 30 times larger than mammals for a lethal dose.

The zyclone powder must not be touched after use or the person will die.

Wrong. Obviously you didn’t actually read NI-9912, because it’s quite clear that the symptoms and treatment for skin contact are the same as for slight poisoning. Prolonged contact with large amounts would kill, though.

So the tale of the guards pooring zyclon through a hole in the roof right on the people and sondercommandos coming in to take out the bodies right after is ridiculous. 20 hours are needed to aerate the room of the gas. And those bodies could not be touched. So zyclon use would have been stupid instead of just leaving them to die of asfixiation.

Again wrong, wrong, wrong. With forced air ventilation, a room the size of the large gas chambers could be fully expunged of gas within 10-15 minutes (using my handy-dandy HVAC reference and derating for primitiveness of the system). Gas masks were used by sonderkommandos, and the pellets aren’t as deadly as you claim.

In delousing gas chambers (the real ones) zynclone was placed in thin layers on sheets of papers and carefully removed after 30 hours of aeration making sure not a gram was left.

30 hours? Even NI-9912 says only 20 is needed. Pulling that number out of your ass, Gibbering Trembler?

Even if Goofus’ claims about Zyklon @ 116 were true (and it’s not as if he has a major fund of credibility built up which would encourage us to think his research was done correctly) his argument STILL depends upon a faulty premise: any act of murder committed in an inefficient manner did not occur.

… and honestly, what can you say to something that stupid? The Nazis did a hell of a lot of things in inefficient manner, starting at the top with Adolf “We’ve developed a jet fighter? Great! Let’s use it as a bomber!” Hitler and continuing right on down the line. Why should anyone believe that they would suddenly achieve absolute perfection in the realm of genocide, especially if they’re asked to believe at the same time that this perfection came from not having ever committed genocide??

Only a jew would be stupid enough to suggest a diesel engine for a gas chamber. Never a german engineer.

For one, it’s a good thing then that the Germans eventually went for Zyklon-B instead of a diesel engine. Maybe they did ask a German engineer, finally.
And two, I can only read this affirmation like this: German engineers are very good at designing mass murder facilities. I didn’t know it was part of their school cursus.
You are not helping your case, Mr Tremblay.

At this point, I feel compelled to mention a very important and chilling book that I read a few years back called IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black. I suspect that this book could have been scandalous enough to have forced IBM to admit their role in the Holocaust, but sadly was eclipsed by the much greater story of the 9/11 terrorist attacks a month after the book’s release. Anyway, here’s the Amazon.com review, which is a far better summary of the book than I could write on short notice.

Was IBM, “The Solutions Company,” partly responsible for the Final Solution? That’s the question raised by Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust, the most controversial book on the subject since Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Black, a son of Holocaust survivors, is less tendentiously simplistic than Goldhagen, but his thesis is no less provocative: he argues that IBM founder Thomas Watson deserved the Merit Cross (Germany’s second-highest honor) awarded him by Hitler, his second-biggest customer on earth. “IBM, primarily through its German subsidiary, made Hitler’s program of Jewish destruction a technologic mission the company pursued with chilling success,” writes Black. “IBM had almost single-handedly brought modern warfare into the information age [and] virtually put the ‘blitz’ in the krieg.”

The crucial technology was a precursor to the computer, the IBM Hollerith punch card machine, which Black glimpsed on exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, inspiring his five-year, top-secret book project. The Hollerith was used to tabulate and alphabetize census data. Black says the Hollerith and its punch card data (“hole 3 signified homosexual … hole 8 designated a Jew”) was indispensable in rounding up prisoners, keeping the trains fully packed and on time, tallying the deaths, and organizing the entire war effort. Hitler’s regime was fantastically, suicidally chaotic; could IBM have been the cause of its sole competence: mass-murdering civilians? Better scholars than I must sift through and appraise Black’s mountainous evidence, but clearly the assessment is overdue.

The moral argument turns on one question: How much did IBM New York know about IBM Germany’s work, and when? Black documents a scary game of brinksmanship orchestrated by IBM chief Watson, who walked a fine line between enraging U.S. officials and infuriating Hitler. He shamefully delayed returning the Nazi medal until forced to–and when he did return it, the Nazis almost kicked IBM and its crucial machines out of Germany. (Hitler was prone to self-defeating decisions, as demonstrated in How Hitler Could Have Won World War II.)

Black has created a must-read work of history. But it’s also a fascinating business book examining the colliding influences of personality, morality, and cold strategic calculation. –Tim Appelo

At this point, I feel compelled to mention a very important and chilling book that I read a few years back called IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black. I suspect that this book could have been scandalous enough to have forced IBM to admit their role in the Holocaust, but sadly was eclipsed by the much greater story of the 9/11 terrorist attacks a month after the book’s release.

I pasted the amazon.com review of the book into a comment, but it was held in moderation (probably for length) so I’ll link to it instead. It does a far better job of summarizing the book than I could do on short notice.

“Unless, of course, one believes that gas masks and forced air ventilation systems were invented prior to WWII.”(Kevin Vicklund)

Common, Kevin, dont play innocent with me. Unless you are blind, you can look like me at the drawings and listen and read the testimonies of the “witnesses”. No gas masks. They even say they were eating while doing this work.

I was not brought up to lie, like you. The denier is you. The evidence against your claim is clear and you have not provided anything reasonnable to refute them. You can try character assassination on me all you like, you will waist your time.

“If you know why it’s import for us for this to be true (which you don’t, really), do you also know why it’s so important to you for it to be false?”(Artk)

Just say it and stop beating around the bush, Artk. I told you I would love to hear it.

Gosh, and here I thought my Mom and Dad and their families and friends were against the Nazis. Who knew?

I am lost in admiration for my maternal grandparents and paternal grandfather who were such clever conspirators that they managed to get themselves born into towns whose populations were later eradicated by the Nazis, just so we could be fooled into thinking the Nazis weren’t in league with the Jews! (Maternal grandparents from Grodzisk, Poland, near Warsaw; paternal grandfather from Palangen, near Riga, Latvia.)

And I thought that when my Dad flew those 40+ bombing missions over Europe in World War II, he was trying to fight the Nazis. I never dreamed it was all a put-up job, and those Army Air Force records must have been forged and he was never there, or perhaps he was there but under deep cover as someone fighting Germans rather than secretly working in league with them to dominate the world. And how fiendishly clever of him to drive his little hardware store into bankruptcy when we were kids, to fool us all into thinking he didn’t have control over the world banking system.

“And I thought that when my Dad flew those 40+ bombing missions over Europe in World War II, he was trying to fight the Nazis. I never dreamed it was all a put-up job, and those Army Air Force records must have been forged and he was never there, or perhaps he was there but under deep cover as someone fighting Germans…”(Jud)

Typical how you distinguish your jewish family from the zionists, but amalgate the Germans with the nazis.

Total dishonnesty.

Yes, the zionists (your representatives) were associates of the nazis, in ideology and goals. The Haavara Agreement is indeniable proof of that, as well as the industrial help of the zionists in South Africa for keeping the nazi war machine going.

If the germans must take responsibility for their representatives, you must do also.

You were the first to declare war on Germany and specified clearly that you wanted this war. Undeniable.

“And I thought that when my Dad flew those 40+ bombing missions over Europe in World War II, he was trying to fight the Nazis. I never dreamed it was all a put-up job, and those Army Air Force records must have been forged and he was never there, or perhaps he was there but under deep cover as someone fighting Germans…”(Jud)

Typical how you distinguish your jewish family from the zionists, but amalgate the Germans with the nazis.

Total dishonnesty.

Yes, the zionists (your representatives) were associates of the nazis, in ideology and goals. The Haavara Agreement is indeniable proof of that, as well as the industrial help of the zionists in South Africa for keeping the nazi war machine going.

If the germans must take responsibility for their representatives, you must do also.

You were the first to declare war on Germany and specified clearly that you wanted this war. Undeniable.

Common, Kevin, dont play innocent with me. Unless you are blind, you can look like me at the drawings and listen and read the testimonies of the “witnesses”. No gas masks. They even say they were eating while doing this work.

Forced air ventilation. No gas mask required. (but some sites didn’t have forced air ventilation, and accounts of those sites mention gas masks)

You were the first to declare war on Germany and specified clearly that you wanted this war.

I’m learning so much from you. Please help me catch up here. When you say “You were the first to declare war on Germany…,” are you speaking of my family, Jews in general, Zionists, Palestine? Or France, England, and the Commonwealth, which were the first nations to formally declare war against Germany (I’m presuming those nations must have done so under our, i.e. Jewish, control)?

You were the first to declare war on Germany and specified clearly that you wanted this war.

I’m learning so much from you. Please help me catch up here. When you say “You were the first to declare war on Germany…,” are you speaking of my family, Jews in general, Zionists, Palestine? Or France, England, and the Commonwealth, which were the first nations to formally declare war against Germany(I’m presuming those nations must have done so under our, i.e. Jewish, control?

Yeah, no way these nations may have declared war on Germany because Hitler’s armies already invaded (sorry I mean liberated) Austria and Poland, both allied to France and England.

I’m thinking of the wisdom of Sethra Lavode, who roughly said: the defender is the one starting a war, by refusing to let itself be invaded by the agressor.

Oh, and Mr Tremblay: my posts have been put in moderation 6 or 7 times in the last 2 years on this very blog. All of them were eventually published within 24hr of submission. Get over it.

And supposedly all of this was to, what, keep Germany down or something? Given they’ve had the most vibrant & strongest economy in Europe for decades (despite the downturn after unification) and are still in the top 5 economies in the world, doesn’t seem to be all that bad.

I don’t know, lurker. At least you know where you stand with him. If I were Jewish, I think I’d prefer someone like him to these fundie whackaloons who rabidly support the Israelis’ worst excesses because they want all the Jews concentrated in one place to be wiped out when Zombie Jesusâ¢ goes on the rampage. With friends like that, who needs enemies?

It’s amazing how well M. Tremblay’s posts confirm Orac’s theory that Holocaust denial is the same kind of stereotypical crank behavior that we’ve seen from the anti-vaxers, HIV denialists, etc. on this blog. No matter how much evidence is amassed in favor of the theory (whether scientific or historical) that they deny, they can’t change their minds. And yet they present no credible alternative hypothesis to explain the mass of evidence that is explained by the mainstream scientific or historical viewpoint which they deny.

I think the IBM tabulating machines described in the book I mentioned earlier are the linchpin to explain the efficiencies with which the Nazis were able to round up and exploit mercilessly their enemies, who were not just Jews, but also Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses (who refused to fight for Germany and were especially despised by the Nazis), and of course their (real or imagined) political enemies.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, the infamous Auschwitz numeric tattoos corresponded to the prisoners’ serial number on a custom (designed by IBM for this application) punch card. Other columns marked the reason the Nazis imprisoned them, other vital statistics, and eventually, cause of death. On several occasions, they ran out of numbers and had to add digits and even letters to the serial number and corresponding tattoo.

I also should mention that IBM did not sell any equipment to the Nazis (other than punch cards, for which they were the sole supplier); it was all leased. So there were IBM technicians repairing and maintaining this expensive IBM leased equipment (card readers, tabulators, printers) at Auschwitz and throughout the Nazi war machine. Headquarters in New York apparently worked very diligently to collect all of the profits from the German and other occupied country divisions of IBM, while studiously ignoring what exactly Deutsche Hollerith GmbH were doing with all those tabulating machines and punch cards.

Almost as a P.S., Edwin Black also describes how efficiently the U.S. was able to round up all of the Japanese residents in the U.S. into internment camps (for purely racist reasons), in part thanks to the U.S. census data (ironically, the first application of punch card technology was for tabulating this information when the population grew too large to do it by hand back in 1880). Very easy to program a tabulator to stack up all the cards where the “race” column equals the code for Japanese. Then you feed the selected cards to another machine to sort by family name, or zip code, or whatever, and another machine prints the records.

Not nearly as powerful as the mainframe computers that came later, but enough to automate a mass genocide in a way that had never been done before, or since. And another very large body of evidence which has no other possible explanation than that the Holocaust existed and was a real event that took place more or less as described by mainstream historians, and not at all like the nonsense that the deniers are peddling (a secret all-encompassing Jewish conspiracy capable of deceiving the majority of the population into thinking that there are other people involved in politics, finance, etc. who would certainly notice such a conspiracy.

I suppose that the big Jewish conspiracy might have a secret lair underground, like the Strangers in Dark City had, where thousands of workers worked on machines to manufacture kajillions of fake artifacts and false evidence, then they could have broken into people’s houses late at night and implanted false memories and beliefs through syringes into their brains while they were sleeping.

If the Zionist conspirators were really aliens with advanced technology experimenting on us, like lab animals, then sure, they could have faked the Holocaust. Or if they were humans but with access to advanced alien technology like in Men in Black they could totally have done it, no problem.

Of course the problem is that Dark City and MiB are movies and not real.

Then you feed the selected cards to another machine to sort by family name, or zip code, or whatever, and another machine prints the records.

Let’s be careful, in a thread where idiots will use any excuse to obfuscate by arguing over even insignificant details, to delineate potential from historical reality. Zip codes didn’t exist until a couple of decades after WWII.

I rather like your trope @147. If the Jews could time travel and teleport, then Israel could have gone back in time from its origin in 1948 to be the first to declare war on Germany, and mass teleportation could provide an alternative explanation for the rather abrupt disappearance of 6 million souls from their homes in Europe. Would that it were so.

If you are ever looking for an experience that will have you shaking your head to try to clear your synapses, try watching the supposedly Jewish-themed programs on evangelical networks, with titles like “The Jewish Jesus.” I know, I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I wasn’t fully prepared for the understanding that by “Jewish,” they really meant the new, improved version of Judaism, i.e., Christianity.

Gebe Tremblay:
Bomba say the gas chamber he was cutting hair in was 12 x 12 feet. That is about the size of my master bedroom ! He say they were 16 barbers in there with 16 stools in front of them. I have difficulty imagining how this could fitï»¿ in my bedroom ! He goes on to say that up to 150 women, with their children, came in that room all at once to get a hair cut.
–

[Lanzmann:] You said there were about sixteen barbers? You cut the air of how many women in one batch?

[Bomba:]In one day there was about, I would say, going into that place between sixty and seventy women in the same room at one time. After we were finished with this party, another party came in, and there were about 140, 150 women. They were all already taken care of, and they told us to leave the gas chamber for a few minutes, about five minutes, when they put in the gas and choked them to death.

-Common, Kevin, dont play innocent with me. Unless you are blind, you can look like me at the drawings and listen and read the testimonies of the “witnesses”. No gas masks. They even say they were eating while doing this work.-

The following is an excerpt from the only source that actually mentions this tidbit: Rudolf Hoess’ postwar memoirs
– The attitude of the men of the special detatchment was also strange. they were all well aware that once the actions were completed they, too, would meet exactly the same fate as that suffered by these thousands of their own race, to whose destruction they had contributed so greatly. Yet, the eagerness with which they carried out their duties never ceased to amaze me. Not only did they never divulge to the victims their impending fate, and were considerately helpful to them while they undressed, but they were also quite prepared to use violence on those who resisted. Then again, when it was a question of removing the trouble makers and holding them while they were shot, they would lead them out in such a way that the victims never saw the non-commissioned officer standing there with his gun ready, and he was able to place its muzzle against the back of their necks without their noticing it. It was the same story when they dealt with the sick and the invalids, who could not be taken into the gas chambers. And it was all done in such a matter of ocurse manner that they might themselves have been the exterminators.
Then the bodies had to be taken from the gas chambers, and after the gold teeth had been extracted, and the hair cut off, they had to be dragged to the pits or to the crematoria. Then the fires in the pits had to be stoked, the surplus fat drained off, and the mountain of burning corpses constantly turned over so that the draught might fan the flames.
They carried out all these tasks with a callous indifference as though it were all part of an ordinary day’s work. While they dragged the corpses about, they ate or they smoked . They did not stop eating even when engaged on the grisly job of burning corpses which had been lying for some time in mass graves.

I leave it to Orac’s readers to decide if GT’s summarization of this quote is an honest reflection of the quote’s intent.